PCB Design Resources and Information

Explore Altium's Resource hub to discover content from blog posts and design guides to technical white papers, all gathered together for your convenience and written by Altium's community of PCB design experts.

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Come See the Upgrades in Altium Designer 22.7 August 12, 2022 ONTRACK BI-WEEKLY New This Month in Altium Designer Take control of your design workflow in Altium Designer 22.7 with new commenting and repository management features. This newest announcement focuses on new commenting and secure repository connection upgrades: Comments & Tasks for Draftsman - The project commenting features now extend into Draftsman documents. All comments in a Draftsman document will be available through a Read Article

What is in the PCB Bill? In this episode, Representative Moore, one of the co-sponsors of H.R.7677, the Supporting American Printed Circuit Boards Act of 2022, will give us brief but insightful details about the bill. Read Article

The Last Mile of Digital Transformation Made Easy We live in an era fueled by innovation. In almost every aspect of our lives, we are constantly being reminded about the pace of innovation, its relentless acceleration touted in the news, its benefit on our lives, and the lifestyles our gadgets enable. For those of us whose business is electronic product design, the impacts of rapid innovation, changing market conditions, and customer expectations also permeate every aspect of our working Read Article

Why Most Via Impedance Calculators Are Inaccurate Via impedance calculators are only useful in the low frequency range, where impedance control is typically not needed. Read Article

Overview of the PCIe 6.0 Standard In this article, we give an overview of changes in the PCIe 6.0 standard as it has been currently published by PCI-SIG. Read Article

Cost Comparison: Subtractive vs. Semi-Additive Expert Tara Dunn discusses the significant benefit of the 3D additive manufacturing process in space savings associated with routing at 15 or 25 microns compared to the standard 75 microns. Read now and learn more about cost comparison with the subtractive process. Read Article

The Promising and Challenging Future of 3D Printed Electronics The business development manager of J.A.M.E.S., Alexandre Schafer talks about the organization’s vision to push the Additively Manufactured Electronic technology to become more accessible to the industry. Read Article

Is There an SPI Trace Impedance Requirement? There is no SPI trace impedance requirement or termination requirement. If this sounds surprising, read this article to see why. Read Article

Mitigating Risk Factors for PCB Manufacturing Lead Times How to deal with nuances in PCB design and manufacturing? In today’s episode, Dave Young the owner of Young Circuits Design and founder of BlueStamp Engineering, and Zach talk about mitigating risk factors early in the stage of electronic design. Read Article

Altium is Enabling Startup ECAD Digitalization

Startups Are Well-Positioned for ECAD Digitalization In today's business age, implementing a transformative digitalization strategy is one of the big keys to a company's ongoing and future success. By adopting and integrating digital platforms, smart applications, and managed services, businesses can transform business processes and product development. Digitalization allows companies to quickly adapt to changing market dynamics and customer expectations while improving overall business efficiency Read Article

The Skin Effect, Current Density, and the Electromagnetic Field Do you know how the skin effect alters the electric and magnetic field around a transmission line? We’ll address an important misconception in this article. Read Article

The Newest Upgrades to Altium Designer 22.7 July 22, 2022 ONTRACK BI-WEEKLY New This Month in Altium Designer Altium Designer 22.7 gives users productivity during schematic capture with the newest productivity upgrades in the schematic editor. This month’s announcement focuses on new schematic capture upgrades: Control of Paste Mask Output for Variants - Users can now control Paste Mask outputs for a variant as part of that variant’s definition. When enabled, the paste mask for that Read Article

Altium Support for PSpice® in the Mixed-Signal Circuit Simulator Altium Designer supports PSpice models in the Mixed-Signal Circuit Simulator. See how you can implement PSpice models in Altium's simulation engine. Read Article

Finding the Right Solar Solution for your Outdoor Embedded Devices In this article Ari Mahpour reviews various solar power source options for your outdoor embedded devices Read Article

Prototyping a Solar Solution for your Outdoor Embedded Device In this article Ari Mahpour proposes a semi-custom solar power source option for your outdoor embedded devices Read Article

Roughness of Copper and its Effect on Signal Integrity Bert Simonovich, a very well-known expert in the signal integrity community, is our guest in today’s podcast episode. He developed the "Cannonball-Huray" model a transmission line loss modeling, which has been adopted in several popular EDA tools. Read Article

The CHIPS Act Signed Into Law The US legislature has passed a reduced version of the CHIPS Act, and now President Biden has signed it into law. Where do we go from here? Read Article